I think the British learn their history through the prism of this gallery of grotesques known as the royals.

I went to graduate school at Harvard for one year I worked in the state legislature in Sacramento for one year. I taught school in Compton for two years.

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure?

I was a Political Science major.

I am one of those people who thrive on deadlines. Nothing brings on inspiration more readily than desperation.

To do then now would be retro. To do then then was very now-tro, if you will.

When Nixon died, on my radio show I started doing sketches with three basic conceits: One, there's a place called Heaven. Two, Nixon got in. And three, he's still taping.

The hardest work most of us do is maintaining the appearance of normality.

When it moved to Friday night it disappeared, when they find another show that can do what The Simpsons does, they will be delighted to do cancel The Simpsons.

Well I directed a few feature length things for HBO in the late eighties.

Nobody makes a movie thinking it's still going to be watched and talked about and quoted 20 years later.

The people you stay around with can either make or mar you

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.

Miracle centered gospels do more damage than good to the listeners and nation.

Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

Being a father and trying to love my daughters with unconditional love - those were all good decisions.

If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.

There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else - but persistent.

People ought to have more control over their lives.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood.

I think the 20s are a vastly overrated decade. We promise kids that once they get out of school, life will begin and their dreams will come true. But then comes the struggle.